Wary Peace

Truce is not something front-line soldiers are trained for; the feeling was strange. Across the front, the Chinese and North Koreans had their orders; they worked hard to convince the U.N. soldiers that the armistice was an occasion for fun & frolic.

At T-Bone Hill, the Reds built an arch of evergreen boughs, invited the G.I.s to "come on over and we will walk through the arch as brothers." At Arsenal Hill. Chinese banged pans, shuffled through the Yangko (harvest dance), while a man's voice, in good English, boomed over the loudspeaker: "Hello, G.I. The war is over. Let's sing together My Old Kentucky Home. I'll give you the beat first." Nobody took him up, so he sang alone.

At Old Baldy the Chinese displayed big cardboard Picasso "peace doves," ran up red, yellow and pink flags, and erected on the crest a huge sign proclaiming "celebration for the signing of the armistice." While G.I.s ogled. Chinese and North Korean girls, in pigtails and with slacks rolled above the knee, sang plaintive songs into hillside microphones and invited their audience to "come on over and talk."

The Grisly Hours. Only in a few places did G.I.s disobey the Eighth Army order not to mingle with the enemy. Even then, it was not to "celebrate." A few days before the truce, marines on the western front had been engaged in a fierce fight with the Chinese. Two hundred bodies, all but a few of them Chinese, lay on East Berlin Hill and in the valley around the outpost. At the first dawn of peace, a handful of Chinese started up the slope toward Marine positions 25 yards away. Carefully the Reds wound through the debris of war: unexploded hand grenades, live mortar shells, empty machine-gun belts, smashed helmets—and the bodies. The marines let the Chinese pass a makeshift barrier, but spurned proffered Chinese cigarettes. Then one marine pointed at a Chinese corpse lying head down in a marine trench, and at a mutilated body of a marine on the Chinese side. He swept his hand back and forth to signify a trade. The Chinese agreed. For three silent, grisly hours, the Chinese and marines pulled their dead from each other's cluttered trenches.

"Do Not Enter." There was other work to be done. Stripped to the waist in the hot sun, G.I.s tore sandbags from frontline bunkers and cut them up so that the Chinese might not sneak in and recover them. Heavy timbers, imported from the U.S., were salvaged and trucked to the rear. Camouflage netting and barbed wire were rolled up and taken away. For three days roads near the front were churned to dust as hundreds of trucks, shuttling to and from the front, carted off tons of ammunition, guns, flamethrowers, heavy machine guns, stoves, radios and telephone wire. Rear units knocked down tents and mess halls that had stood undisturbed for two years. Artillery pieces backed out of semipermanent, neatly fenced-in positions, surrounded by bushes and flowers.

All along the front, troops began erecting a double-strand barbed-wire fence, posted signs in English and Korean reading "South Limit Demilitarized Zone. Do Not Enter." All that remained in the scarred and desolate area beyond the signs were the mines and booby traps which the armistice commission must destroy with. in 45 days.